It was July when we arrived, and the sky over Los Angeles was as thick and blue as acrylic paint. The mountains were metallic, the palm trees burnt and hairy, and everything was covered with a thin dusty cast. Pace was in tech. I was a hand model. We had no other talents to speak of, so California was the only place that made sense. It was where we would weather the impending apocalypse, nuclear strike, civil war, The Big One. Whichever came first.
On move-in day, Pace and I stood together in the center of the living room, admiring its vacant potential, the slanted rectangles of golden sunlight cast over cherry hardwood. It was our first apartment together and neither of us had ever lived in a house that got so much light, with its tall, cottage-style windows on every wall. Something about the California sun gave us a craving for clementines, so we drove to the store and bought a bag, though they were not yet in season. We sat on the floor, peeled the rinds, and piled them at our feet. Soaked in sunlight, eating clementines, we became an image of ourselves, a postcard, like a verse written by one of those poets who’s never worked a day in their lives—the ones for whom all the world is milk and moon, honey and sun.
Then came the eyes. An old man stood at the end of our walkway, staring in through the front windows, spoiling the sanctity of our postcard poem. Pace sat up and waved, attempting a neighborly smile. We were new, and it was natural to be curious about the new people on your street. The man stared straight through us, frowning slightly. He did not raise his hand or nod his head.
An hour later, it was a young mother pushing a baby carriage down the sidewalk. She passed slowly, craning her neck to see inside the house, completely unabashed at the sight of us staring back at her. She wore a floral romper over a knockoff Gucci T-shirt and had hair the burnt yellow of an at-home bleach attempt. I hated her romper, her patchy self-tanner, the blank, unthinking glaze of her expression. I hated the way she could enter our house with only her eyes, spoiling our sunlight, our clementines.
Curtains, Pace said, and I nodded. Cheered by the prospect of Swedish meatballs and simulated living spaces, we agreed to go to Ikea the next morning. At nearly 500,000 square feet, the nearest Ikea was the largest in the country, a fact that made us strangely proud. For most people in most places, nothing was the biggest or smallest or the best or worst. It just was.
That night, we lay flat on our new high-density foam mattress—delivered earlier that evening in a vacuum-sealed bag—watching the headlights of passing cars streak across the ceiling. The empty dark of the room made me want to fill it with something. I had only my voice, so I asked Pace about the staring neighbors. “What were they hoping to see? And why didn’t they look away when we stared back?”
“That’s what people do here,” he said, suddenly an expert on West Coast psychology. “They look, they watch. They buy doorbells with hidden cameras so they can keep watching even when they’re away. They don’t even notice themselves watching, they just do it.”
He went on to say that our culture had done away almost completely with shame. It was still there as an undercurrent, but we no longer knew where to put it, we had forgotten its many uses. Instead of responding, I let his words hover. Pace rolled onto his side, and his breathing grew heavy, but I stayed awake into the night, thinking of shame. I thought of the Victoria’s Secret push-up bikini I’d worn to shreds in middle school. I thought of the way I’d felt as a child whenever my piano teacher noticed that I hadn’t practiced. I thought of all the people who’d cleaned up my vomit in college. I thought of curtains and their absence. Finally, I thought of my family, whom I’d left behind for this new world of opportunity. Everyone back home was getting older. It was only a matter of time.
I tucked my hands beneath the pillow to stop myself from picking at my fingernails. If I tore the skin, I was less likely to book modeling gigs.
Earlier that day, before the eyes, before the clementines, Pace and I had gotten into a disagreement. A small thing, really. The moving pod arrived with our boxes and, after catching my nail on a rip in the cardboard, I let one drop to the ground; its contents spilled across the sidewalk. Only one thing broke—a cheap OHIO snow globe from Pace’s collection of road trip souvenirs—but his face had shattered with it. He didn’t understand when I told him I couldn’t carry any more boxes. He said I was being ridiculous. I told him he didn’t care about my career.
I sat on the floor and watched as he brought in the rest of the boxes, one by one, silent. After stacking the final box, he walked over and kissed my brow. We’re going to make this work, he said, and I nodded. Everything was behind us now. We had outgrown our lives in Pennsylvania, and there was no going back. It was up to us to fill the empty space with something new, to build something that belonged to only us.
***
In the morning, we took care to avoid the front windows, carrying our clothes into the bathroom to change. We ate in the kitchen, hunched over the counter like teenagers. I scrolled the news on my phone, lingering on an article titled “Is Shame Bad for Art?” The article featured a corporate-style drawing of a pale blue woman in flowy pants frowning at an orange paintbrush. No, I thought with some conviction. Surely shame was the saving grace of art, the only thing that could possibly rescue us from more of those flat, soulless illustrations. If more people allowed themselves to feel shame, maybe there would be less terrible art in the world.
“Look at this.” I held my phone up to show Pace the article.
He said: “Hm.”
I continued scrolling. Beneath the article was an ad for blackout curtains with a photo of a beautiful woman sleeping peacefully on her side, safe and shielded from the outside world. Shortly after Pace first said “curtains” aloud, my phone had started advertising them to me. Years ago, this would have alarmed me, but I’d grown used to my phone’s subtle surveillance. I knew it was listening to me, but I hardly minded. The algorithm felt like a companion, an agreeable friend who would tell me exactly what I wanted to hear and show me what I wanted to see.
After breakfast, Pace and I headed to the car, nearly colliding with a family as we turned the corner of the sidewalk toward our parking spot down the street.
“Hi!” I said, arranging my features into a friendly expression. Pace wrapped his arm around me and smiled at the family.
The parents hardly reacted, gazing at our faces with what appeared to be mild interest. The children, too, said nothing. The youngest, a boy, bounced a rubber ball on the ground and it lit up like fireworks. The father grunted and they continued down the sidewalk.
“It’s like we’re in a video game,” I mumbled. “NPCs.”
“What?” said Pace.
We got into the car and forgot about it. Ikea was only eight minutes away, according to Google Maps. I thought of all the things we would buy there: matching nightstands, bamboo toothbrush holders, cubed shelves, seafoam green couch cushions, and blackout curtains, of course. We’d gotten rid of our old furniture, most of which had come from curbs and thrift stores. It seemed important that we choose our new everything together. I wanted smooth surfaces and petite, stackable appliances. I wanted a microwave that looked like it was designed by Steve Jobs. I wanted to take pictures of my perfectly manicured hands in rooms that were as bright and depthless as commercial backdrops. I wanted beauty and invisibility. I knew I should feel shame about these contradictory desires, but I decided not to dwell on it. It was the sort of thing the old me would have spent hours thinking about, but there was no time for dwelling in my new life, only California dreaming.
The Ikea parking garage was large, but not as labyrinthine as we’d imagined. We found a spot and stepped out into the soundproof air. Ever since I was young, I’d been drawn to parking garages for the vacuum-like quality of the air. They were good places for humming and thinking, for feeling desperately, cinematically American. Other such places included gas stations, roller rinks, baseball stadiums, and Costcos. Pretty much anywhere you could buy a hot dog.
We followed the trail of new arrivals inside, glancing around for further instructions. A yellow Hej! sign indicated that we should start on the second floor, where we would find the gallery of assembled room pods, as well as the food court, which the sign referred to as Restaurant & Cafe. Pace grabbed a yellow shopping bag, and we stepped aboard the escalator. It was not immediately clear where to begin. Everyone else seemed to know instinctively which way to go; families glided by like birds, disappearing down cavernous aisles and into the showrooms, squawking cheerfully about wall shelving and storage cubes.
The first exhibit we encountered was not for furniture but security: doorbell cameras, nursery cameras, outdoor cameras with floodlights, and night-vision cameras equipped with treat launchers for pets. A safer world starts with a safer home, read a colorful banner hanging above the display. Another simply said: Eye-KEA!
The next display promoted an “immersive” new augmented reality app where you could superimpose true-to-scale 3D models of Ikea products through your phone’s camera to visualize how they might look in your own living space. A looping video showed a family snuggled on a sectional sofa, gleefully swiping on an iPad, swapping out antique wooden chairs, dressers, and bedframes with stylish modern substitutes. Each time they selected a product on the screen, it would pop into existence, as if by magic. The children in the video danced around the room, marveling at their new surroundings.
“Well,” said Pace, frowning. “Shall we make our way to the bedroom?”
“Bedrooms,” I corrected. Arrows on the floor directed us toward the gallery of assembled rooms. The first was all white, save for a gray carpet under the bed with a pattern of broken triangles. White paper lanterns hung over the center of the display, casting a cold light over the immaculately made bed. Long sheer curtains hung on the far wall, spilling gently over the faux-hardwood floor. There was a wicker laundry basket in the corner with a neatly folded towel draped over its edge. The basket was scarcely large enough to hold even a couple days’ worth of dirty clothes, but this did not matter. It would never need to.
“See anything?” Pace asked.
I blinked, trying to focus on the outlines of all the sleek white items in order to distinguish them from one another. The furniture looked like it could belong to anyone: bright and clean and anonymous. A digital red glow caught my eye. I pointed at the alarm clock on the nightstand, and Pace snapped a picture of the item number.
We proceeded down the aisle, lingering outside a navy blue bedroom display where two teenage girls with matching Scooby-Doo backpacks lay sprawled across the bed, staring at their phones. Their outfits approximated early-2000s trends without any of the more awkward, unflattering elements of the originals: baggy, hip-hugging jeans, babydoll tops, seashell necklaces.
Concurrent waves of jealousy and nostalgia washed over me; they looked exactly how I’d imagined myself to look when I was in middle school. Pace took a step forward, examining the tag on the comforter, and one of the girls looked up, frowning slightly. Her friend giggled at her phone. It felt like intruding on a sleepover. I tried to imagine how Pace and I must appear to the girls and felt a violent rush of embarrassment. I didn’t want them to see us, two boring adults bickering over furniture and taking the world seriously. I wanted them to know that, inside, I was still the same as them. Still just a girl. Just as funny, just as lost.
“Pace,” I said, backing out of the room. “You know I don’t like navy.”
“Oh,” he said. “Sure, yeah.”
He reached for my hand, but I pretended not to notice and tucked it inside my pocket. I thought I heard the girls laughing as we exited the room and turned the corner, making our way into a spacious yellow nursery. Abstract pastel artwork hung on the thin makeshift walls. A wooden crib was positioned in the center of the display. A single fluorescent light hung directly above it, illuminating its emptiness, its potential.
I ran my fingers over the crib’s painted plywood. Looking down at my hand, at my polished oval nail beds, it was hard not to think of advertisements. But I didn’t want to think of advertisements. I wanted to think of babies and beginnings.
“Poignant,” said Pace in a voice that suggested he didn’t find it poignant at all. I flushed, embarrassed at the idea that he had somehow intuited my feelings and rejected them.
A stuffed bear sat atop a plastic rocking chair in the corner of the display, wearing a stitched smile. The sight of it collapsed something in my chest. I looked to see if Pace had noticed the bear too, but he’d already disappeared into another showroom. I stayed behind, holding my hand up to random objects in the room, practicing how I might hold them in a photoshoot. I cupped my palm around the bear’s head. Pinched a wooden rattle delicately between my thumb and index finger. Lifted a pillow from inside the crib and then placed it back down.
I drifted toward the windows of the nursery, which glowed with the flat artificial light of a skyless storm. To my left was a small doorway with an ornate doorknob that seemed at odds with the room’s minimalist aesthetic.
My phone buzzed. Pace had sent a picture of two long red curtains and a single question mark.
Too red, I replied.
He sent another; this time, the curtains were beige.
Too beige, I said. I wanted green. He could never seem to remember that I liked green.
Where are u? he wrote back.
I put my phone in my pocket without responding and approached the doorway. Somewhere in an adjacent room, a child was crying.
The door did not lead to a closet as I’d expected, but instead spilled into a long, narrow hallway with colorful storage cubes affixed to the walls, each containing stuffed elephants, obscure Swedish magazines, and plastic succulents. A sign at the far end read Vart ska du gå? with an English translation printed beneath it in tiny lettering: Where are you going? I took a photo to send to Pace, but the text bubble soured to green. No signal.
I walked quickly down the hallway and paused outside the next room, sensing a change in the air. It was softer, somehow, dampened. I could no longer hear the child’s cries or the sounds of browsing customers or the hum of the fluorescent lighting. I couldn’t hear anything at all.
I opened the door and stepped through. As I looked around, the details of the room seemed to fill themselves in where before there was only white, open space. A maroon rocking chair appeared in the corner with a colorful quilted blanket draped over its arm. A kitten calendar hung on the wall beside an Audubon singing-bird clock. A mahogany writing desk stood beneath two tall farmhouse windows that glowed, implausibly, with warm, natural light.
Padding to the center of the room, I turned to better take in my surroundings. There was a gauzy quality to the light, and the curtains billowed with invisible wind. I felt an urge to lie down on the braided wool rug, to curl into a ball with my knees to my chest and stay that way until someone came to find me. Maybe I could rest for a while. Pace could handle the rest of our shopping list without me.
I stared at the wall for a long moment, trying to resist the urge to sink to my knees and sleep. It was then I noticed that the kitten calendar was from the year 2002. I found this odd, but many of the decorative artifacts used in the Ikea display rooms were dated—old children’s picture books and cookbooks and poetry books, all in Swedish. The calendar wasn’t in Swedish, though. It was in English.
In fact, none of the furniture looked like it belonged to Ikea. It was all too solid, the colors too rich and sun-faded. I could see individual threads coming out of the stitching in the quilt, which appeared heavy and lumpy in places, clearly handmade. A slow sensation of recognition crept over me. I knew this place implicitly, the way I would know my own face, or the backs of my hands.
I was in Pennsylvania, standing in the center of my Nana’s old living room.
This was not magic, I told myself, nor was it hallucination. This was something else, something with a simple explanation. I wandered over to the rocking chair and sat down carefully, testing its materiality. It felt substantial enough.
My chest tightened. Surely I was experiencing some next-level marketing campaign, some immersive new feature designed to capitalize on my nostalgia, which was, after all, the strongest human emotion, stronger, even, than shame. It wasn’t enough anymore to build a sturdy piece of furniture that did its job; the furniture had to psychologically manipulate you. They were always pushing and pushing, trying to find the limits—of what? I wanted to see how far they’d take it. I pulled the quilt tight around my shoulders, tilting my head to breathe in the fabric. It smelled synthetic and unfamiliar. Apparently they still hadn’t figured out how to simulate scent yet. It had always been the trickiest of the senses.
The Audubon gave three raspy trills, drawing me back into the almost-reality of the room. Sound. Now that one was easy.
I lifted my phone to take a photo, but the screen showed only blank space. I tilted my head back to scan for cameras and realized that the warehouse ceiling had disappeared. Above me was the wood paneling from Nana’s house, the same dusty brown ceiling fan with the gold pull chain that was always clanking against the glass bowl. I stood and moved to the writing desk, lifted the scuffed oak lid. Inside were several compartments and one large drawer, each stuffed with crumpled stationery, notes, receipts. I picked up a card and held it up to the window, but couldn’t make out any words, only vague squiggles resembling Nana’s unassailable Catholic school penmanship. The room was not a precise replica. It was an approximation, or a memory. A sort of postcard.
I began to search the room, trying to identify the product, the thing they were trying to sell. I lifted the rug and pulled out the couch cushions. I emptied the drawers of Nana’s writing desk onto the floor, carelessly scattering the papers. I wrenched the clock off the wall and scratched around the back for the battery compartment, but there wasn’t one. I flung open the windows. The landscape outside was blurry and imprecise, the neighboring houses nowhere to be seen. I reached out to see if it was real or just a backdrop, and my hand grasped at empty air.
“Nana?” I said, my voice catching. Of course, there was no response.
The door was still there when I turned around. The room didn’t seem to want anything from me. I dropped the bird clock in my bag. I don’t know why but I had to take something. I exited the room and closed the door behind me. I headed down the hallway, relieved to see the warehouse ceilings towering above me again. When I returned to the nursery showcase, my phone regained its signal, lighting up with an urgent string of messages from Pace:
What’s going on?
Where did u go
????
I picked out curtains. Meet me @ food court
I marked his last message with a small red heart. I drifted through the room pods with renewed fervor, holding my hand out to brush against furniture and fabrics as I followed the overhead signs to the food court. I passed through living rooms and kitchens, bathrooms and laundry rooms, offices and playrooms, absorbing their covert signals and implications. This could be your kitchen. You can make a perfect breakfast on this stove and the eggs will slide off the pan without breaking the yolks. There will be no mess to deal with, no filth to scrape off the surfaces. Everything in its proper place. A container for every single one of life’s imaginable problems. This could be your BROGRUND towel rack, your RINNIG dish drainer, your HASVÅG mattress. This could be your home, your life—the manifestation of your brief earthly existence.
At last, I emerged from the endless maze into the open theater of the food court. I stood there for a moment, half-dazed, watching customers hang their shopping bags on designated hooks before filing into various lines, stacking carts with trays, trays with plates, and plates with bite-sized Swedish meatballs, peas, mashed potatoes, lingonberry sauce, and cake. The bistro seemed to replenish itself automatically, a gleaming shrine to abundance.
I wondered if the other customers had experienced anything like what I’d seen—if anyone had unwittingly stumbled into a near-perfect replica of a childhood memory—but their faces were calm and vacant, betraying no signs of worry or vexation. I scanned the rows of tables for Pace until finally I located him by the wall of windows overlooking the parking lot. He sat with his hands folded and eyes closed, as if he had been waiting there for some time.
“Pace,” I called, moving toward him.
As I walked, a guttural honk erupted somewhere behind me, followed by the crash of silverware. I stopped and turned. A ripple of silence spread across the food court, dimming the easy thrum of conversation. Forks hovered in midair as people craned their necks in search of the disturbance. The noise came again, louder, echoing in the expansive room. It was primal and gurgling, the sound of a dying animal. The collective gaze of the customers singled out a man sitting alone by the entrance, clawing at his throat. He gasped and spluttered like a clogged drain, emitting a series of strangled cries that sounded eerily similar to Ikea product names.
The crowd watched with polite interest, waiting for someone to spring into action, but no one moved. Even the staff seemed locked in place. There was no training, no protocol for this.
In my bag, the Audubon clock sounded the call of the Great-Horned Owl: Hoo-h’hoo-hoo-hoo. Twelve o’clock. Another hour, gone forever. I clasped the bag to my chest to muffle the sound, a little surprised the clock was still in there. Part of me had thought it would disappear, like Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage.
Hoo-h’hoo.
The man slammed his fists against the table. His plate slid off the edge and clattered to the ground, little gray meatballs rolling off in every direction, coming to rest at the feet of nearby customers. Everyone remained seated, staring in eager anticipation of some resolution, some easy explanation for this embarrassing display. I stared, too, wishing I could record what I was seeing, just to know it was really happening.
Hoo. Hoo. Hoo.
A few moments passed before my body lurched into motion again. As I neared Pace and the bright wall of windows behind him, I could see the parking lot stretching toward the highway. From above, it looked almost like a board game, the people and cars like little plastic pieces. Pace hadn’t moved from his seat. He sat with his plate untouched, hands folded patiently together. His eyes were open, fixed on the choking man. I raised my hand, but he didn’t seem to notice. I felt invisible, exposed. I wondered if he could even see me, or if my body was lost somewhere in the showrooms, curled under Nana’s quilt.
Down in the lot, customers filed in and out of the warehouse, struggling with their unwieldy purchases and overstuffed carts. They moved slowly, looking at their phones, blinking up at the sky. They seemed like people waking up from a dream, unsure how they had ended up in the parking lot with so many products in tow. Surely they didn’t need all this stuff.
I took another step toward the windows, leaving Pace and the choking man behind. I watched as two teenage girls exited the Ikea, skipping down the sidewalk. It was the same two girls from the navy bedroom—I recognized their backpacks. Something about them was different from the other customers, though I couldn’t tell what at first. They seemed lighter and leaner, awake and undreamy. They were the only ones who carried nothing: no shopping carts, no boxes, no plastic bags. Their hands were empty.
I heard my name and turned around. Pace stood behind me, a yellow shopping bag in tow, his arm raised as if to touch my shoulder.
“We shouldn’t have come here,” I said.
“Here?” he echoed. I gestured blankly at the palm trees outside the window, shame gathering itself like a cloud in my chest. This place wasn’t for us, we didn’t deserve it, we didn’t belong. We had only come to play a temporary game of pretend. I missed our old furniture, how everything was made of real wood with real density and nothing fit together.
Pace reached into the bag and pulled out a set of green curtains. He held them up over our heads like a blanket fort, enveloping us in the fabric. My eyes were open, but I couldn’t see a thing. The cafeteria disappeared and with it the choking man and all the other customers, the wall of windows and the parking lot. The girls. Pace pulled me closer, and I let my body fold into his. The curtains blocked out everything, even the light.
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